While fighting the Vietnam war, both sides face a new kind of threat that neither of them were prepared for.

Firebase is Neill Blomkamp’s second of three experimental shorts recently released via his latest baby project Oats Studios. You can see Neill’s 3rd terrifying film Zygote, right here on Film Shortage. Firebase takes us deep into the Vietnam war and turns it into a surreal and unforgiving platoon that’s horrifying even for a war field.

The initial idea was the concept of living in a virtual simulation: simulation hypothesis was the core basis. The theory behind this was born out of the idea that we exist in a simulated construct, where there are errors or anomalies. If you think of the universe as a piece of software, then there would be this self-correcting code that would come in and fix the erroneous code.

We came up with the idea of someone who accidentally breaks through the program and is able to see and understand that there’s more to reality than the level they exist in. We wanted someone who could play with the laws of thermodynamics, time, and space. In the case of the River God, he’s acting almost subconsciously. He’s more of an error or an anomaly. Plus, the idea of a science fiction story set in Vietnam is interesting, and a concept I haven’t seen that much of.

In this film, the River God starts tampering with the fabric of space-time. This universe corrects that by sending in people like Hines, who don’t understand why they were drawn to these anomalies, or what their purpose is. They just know they have to stop this thing from happening. On a higher level, he’s almost like an antivirus program.

Read the full interview on The Verge.